Or perhaps I should just say the women in Love in the Ruins. At any rate, I think the following passage is the key to understanding the way women are portrayed there:
Women are mythical creatures. The have no more connection with the ordinary run of things than do centaurs.
There are two errors that men are likely to make in the way we think of women, and the way we expect women to think and behave. One is to assume that they are just like us. The other is to take them as more or less a different species, aliens with whom we can converse but whose inner lives—and, consequently, their behavior—we must expect to remain a mystery. In time, of course, we learn, or at least most of us do, that the truth is somewhere in between.
The fact is that female beauty and sexuality do sometimes, especially when he is young and she is beautiful, seem to be for a man the definitive and most interesting (at worst, the only interesting) qualities of a woman. That's the way More is seeing his three girlfriends in this novel. If it seems to women that this portrayal is unreal, well, yes, it is—very unreal. But this is a first-person narrative, and so the author's first job is to make the narrator real. The question is not whether More's perception of women does justice to them, but whether that perception is rendered accurately and convincingly. To this man at any rate the answer is a firm yes.
If this is granted, though, the question naturally follows: is Percy capable of developing a female character who is a convincing portrayal of a real woman? I'm not so sure. I haven't read his novels for some years and would want to re-read them before venturing a judgment. But I did notice that the one scene in Love in the Ruins where a plausible view of the real inner life of a real woman is required doesn't work for me. I mean the conversation between More and his wife in which he tries to talk her out of leaving—it's a flashback while he is hiding from the sniper in the "enclosed patio." (And by the way does anyone know why "enclosed patio" is always in quotes?) Almost all the dialog given to Doris in this scene strikes me as wrong and unconvincing.
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Light On Dark Water 
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